Electronic highway to where?

President Clinton was elected to restore prosperity to the American economy. From the beginning, high tech has been the chosen instrument to achieve this end. Computerization and high-speed telecommunications are the promising routes, in Washington's view, to economic revitalization. How justified this linkage is, we leave aside for the moment.

What is becoming clear is that in pursuit of the goal of economic stimulation through high-powered information technology, the democratic character of American society is at risk. Well on the way to extinction is the public sector of American life-the space where social purpose takes precedence over private gain. Increasingly, public schools, public libraries, and the public arts are endangered species.

Much of what is happening is centered in the production and distribution apparatus for images and messages. The nation's informational-media-cultural sphere is the terrain of the sweeping but relatively unexamined changes. The White House and other prominent voices see an expanded, state-of-the-art electronic information system as the key to general economic improvement, individual well-being and substantial profitability.

NII AGENDA FOR ACTION

In September 1993, the federal government laid out these expectations in a comprehensive report entitled "The National Information Infrastructure: Agenda for Action." The proposed "Agenda for Action" is "the construction of an advanced National Information Infrastructure (NII), a seamless web of communication networks, computers, databases, and consumer electronics that will put vast amounts of information at users' fingertips."

When this infrastructure is developed, the government claims, it "can help unleash an information revolution that will change forever the way people live, work, and interact with each other." More specifically, the new information "highway" "will enable U.S. firms to compete and win in the global economy, generating good jobs for the American people and economic growth for the nation.... [T]he NII can transform the lives of the American people--ameliorating the constraints of geography, disability, and economic status."

Powerful expectations! How will this happy state come into being? The President's advisers see the physical components--cameras, scanners, keyboards, telephones, fax machines, computers, switches, compact discs, video and audio tape, cable, wire, satellites, optical fiber, transmission lines, microwave nets, television, printers, etc.--integrated and interconnected "in a technologically neutral manner, so that no one industry will be favored over any other."

THE PRIVATE SECTOR AND THE NII

At the same time the presidential document repeatedly emphasizes that, "The private sector will lead in the [development and] deployment of the NII." "Agenda for Action," in fact, acknowledges that "the private sector is already developing and deploying such an infrastructure." This may be the understatement of the year!

Vast corporate mergers and acquisitions, which show no signs of abating, are transforming the domestic informational-media-cultural landscape. Telephone, computer, cable, and entertainment companies, already dominant in their fields, are combining and making alliances that will ensure their near total envelopment of the anticipated future electronic environment.

These mergers herald a powerful corporate move to pre-empt the informational-cultural realm. Who will emerge triumphant in the current corporate rivalries for controlling position is still obscure. What is clear is that the corporate stakeholders will be few, their resources enormous and concentrated, and their concern riveted to their balance sheets.

ABANDANMENT OF THE PUBLIC INTEREST

At the same time, the public interest faces abandonment alongside the (electronic) road. One of the telltale signs of this abandonment is a key policy set forth in the President's NII report, already on the way to implementation. It is the announced sale to private users of a chunk of frequencies in the radio spectrum--the natural (and national) resource which is used for all wireless communication. From the beginning of radio in the early days of the twentieth century, the radio spectrum, however poorly managed, has always been regarded and treated as the inalienable property of the American people. No longer! Now it will become the property of those who can bid the most for slices of it. The super communications corporations that are being feverishly created will be the major bidders.

Though the auction arrangements appear to guarantee a large number of bidders, the final outcome is hardly in doubt. The released part of the spectrum will wind up in the clutches of a few mega-corporations. This is noted in an 18 October 1993 Business Week commentary by Mark Lewyn titled "A Boon for Telecoms, A Break for Taxpayers" which states, "The likely outcome will be a vigorous market in licenses, with the MCIs and the AT&Ts buying the rights of the smaller, successful bidders."

The public, failing government intervention--which is hardly likely since the program is governmentally supported to begin with--is shut out. This dismaying development is given a benign gloss in the President's report. It states that the allocation and use of the radio spectrum will be "streamlined," and that the application of market principles in spectrum distribution "will promote greater flexibility."

Hokum aside, with governmental support and encouragement, message and image generation, transmission, and dissemination are being handed off to the clutch of giant corporations.

THE FATE OF THE INTERNET

Selling off a parcel of public property, however, is but a modest depredation compared with the corporate appropriation of the public sphere in the offing. The stated aim of the Clinton administration is to create a National Information Infrastructure--essentially a comprehensive electronic highway that will carry voice, data, and video in digital form. But a far-flung electronic network already exists. It is the Internet.

The Internet, begun in 1969, was originally an experimental computer network organized and financed by the Department of Defense (ARPAnet). It was made available to facilitate the research of a small number of scientists, engineers, and researchers. The National Science Foundation (NSF) also contributed funds. In this period, commercial usage of the network was prohibited.

Over time, the number of users of Internet multiplied greatly, although it remains mostly a university and research tool. Currently, however, it is estimated that there are more than 15 million users, mostly in the United States but also in 134 other countries, among which are increasing numbers of commercial enterprises. In early 1993, more than half of the registered networks were private businesses.

Still, to date, the Internet continues to be an assemblage of networks that offer relatively uninhibited expression to its many users, with individuals exchanging views and messages in a non-hierarchical system. It has been the closest approximation, in the emerging electronic information age, of an open forum for ideas and untrammeled expression. Some view the Internet as the embodiment of a new form of (electronic) democracy. Mitchell Kapor, for instance, the founder of the Lotus Development Corporation--a very successful computer software company--offers this by no means atypical assessment of the Internet in a recent issue of WIRED:

...Life in cyberspace seems to be shaping up exactly like Thomas Jefferson would have wanted ... founded on the primacy of individual liberty and a commitment to pluralism, diversity, and community ... openness, freedom and diversity ... is the true promise of this technology....

However hyperbolic, the Internet's initial non-commercial character and the relatively free exchange of messages it supports lend a certain plausibility to Kapor's (and others') enthusiasm. Its expansion as a national public utility would justify the belief that democracy could be strengthened with electronic communication.

But the NII outlined in the President's report, and, more tellingly, the steps underway in the corporate information technology-entertainment spheres, foretell a very different development. Public concerns are being elbowed out of the way to suit the goals of cable, telephone, and entertainment combines.

And not surprisingly, the Internet itself--which could serve as the core of the new superhighway with its initial non-commercial characteristics intact--is being pushed toward commercialization. Its subsidy from the National Science Foundation, which allowed it to remain independent of the private sector, is being removed in 1994. Its commercial users are multiplying while hungrily eyeing the network's millions of users as potential advertising targets. According to Steve Stecklow of the Wall Street Journal, advertisers "are beginning to view the global network as a potential electronic gold mine."

Pressed from within, and almost certain to be outflanked from without, by a corporate-financed and managed electronic superhighway, the democratic promise of the Internet is fading rapidly. The "high tech vision of Jeffersonian democracy," writes Steve Lohr of the New York Times, "would have to be paid for by private enterprise;...it is big corporations that will invest the many billions of dollars over the next several years to build the information highway. Some worry that they will have no incentive to offer anything but the most profitable services."

The nation's social-informational needs that are so desperately deficient are quite likely to be submerged in a flood of entertainment and electronic gadgetry services that the corporate players are readying. On 13 October 1993 the Wall Street Journal reported that, "After spending most of the past decade fighting tooth and nail, cable companies and phone companies are joining up to deliver an array of interactive TV and telephone services so vast that it isn't yet clear Americans are even ready for it." No matter! Ready or not, the services are on their way.

CORPORATE CONTROL

Given these "realities," that is, acceptance of corporate ownership and control of the new electronic highway, Mitchell Kapor, the prophet of electronic democracy, is reduced to wistful reflection. He writes: "The critical public choice regarding the information highway is this: If industry builds it, how happy will we be with the result? ... The optimist in me thinks we should give telephone and cable companies every opportunity to get it right. In fact, we should seek to educate and enlighten, while developing contingency plans."

Enlightening billion dollar corporations may be an oxymoron. At the very least, it makes the problems of teaching within the nation's public schools seem trivial.

In the new and improved electronic network, the ownership and the direction, however they are defined and presented by Washington, are corporate. It is worth recalling, therefore, that for more than one hundred years, Americans have mistrusted and sought to limit economic monopoly. The Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890, and a variety of state and federal measures since, were enacted to rein in the power of big money and the Trusts.

In the 1990s, this concern seems to have disappeared, and vast agglomerations of private resources and power have been tolerated, often encouraged. More disturbing still, the new economic overlords are those active in the informational-media-cultural spheres. Railroads, banks, and steel complexes threatened the economic well-being of nineteenth and early twentieth century citizens. Today's cultural barons threaten our minds. A popular movement in behalf of a non-monopolistic cultural environment seems a reasonable and urgent goal in the new electronics age.

Herbert I. Schiller is Professor Emeritus of Communication at the University of California-San Diego, Distinguished Visiting Professor at The American University in Washington, D.C., and the author of The Mind Managers, Mass Communications, and American Empire and Culture Inc.: The Corporate Takeover of Public Expression.

Copyright National Forum: Phi Kappa Phi Journal Spring 1994
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